K4SPBlog

As program director for my club, I had Ed Fong do his standard presentation last year. He does these by request for clubs across the country and then offers a discounted group buy to the club afterward. I've built one clone of an Ed Fong DBJ and currently use it as well as two purchased antennas at my house for a base station, VHF Winlink and APRS. Below I’ve included my personal notes on installing Ed Fong antennas that I’ve gleaned either from Ed himself or my experience with them over the past year. The bottom approx. six inches in the pipe is just coax and not active antenna. This is for clamp mounting to a mast. Gluing/cementing the top cap is optional. If you are suspending the antenna from the top it is highly recommended. Gluing the bottom cap (with the coax connection) WILL void your warranty. These still seal quite well with compression. Paint of some kind is strongly encouraged. PVC degrades under UV light. Ed recommends regular rustoleum (avoid metallic colors, hammered...

 I run a Winlink RMS at the house and occasionally encounter software issues that will take it offline for a few hours. This gets frustrating when Trimode encounters a serial port or soundcard error and spends hours trying to self correct. Trimode has a mechanism to prevent an excessive number of restarts but it is excessively high and out of all its menus there isn't one to change this setting lower. All of the Winlink sysop programs  include a feature for offline notifications but if you're hardware/software are offline and the Winlink programs still have connections to the CMS  you won't receive these notifications. In those instances where Trimode is struggling, it will go through all of its restarts (approx. 50) then stop itself and the minimum alert time is 2 hours after that failure to start. I've done all I can in Windows registry to standardize my USB devices so the programs always find their designated device but things still pop up intermittently. I have the...